Alonzo Church, (born June 14, 1903, Washington, D.C., U.S.—died Aug. 11, 1995, Hudson, Ohio) U.S. mathematician. He earned a Ph.D. from Princeton University. His contributions to number theory and the theories of algorithms and computability laid the foundations of computer science. The rule known as Church’s theorem or Church’s thesis (proposed independently by Alan M. Turing) states that only recursive functions can be calculated mechanically and implies that arithmetic procedures cannot be used to decide the consistency of statements formulated in accordance with the laws of arithmetic. He wrote the standard textbook Introduction to Mathematical Logic (1956) and helped found the Journal of Symbolic Logic, which he edited until 1979.

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June 23, 1912 London, England June 7, 1954 Wilmslow, Cheshire British mathematician and logician, who made major contributions to mathematics, cryptanalysis, logic, philosophy, and mathematical biology and also to the new areas later named computer science, cognitive science, artificial...

in history of logic

Several major logicians of the late19th and 20th centuries subscribed to the view of logic as language, including, in addition to Frege and Russell, the early Wittgenstein, W.V.O. Quine, and Alonzo Church. Because of the strength of the traditional view of logic as a lingua universalis, systematic studies of the semantic aspects of logic developed rather...

Different characterizations of effective computability were given largely independently by several logicians, including Alonzo Church in 1933, Kurt Gödel in 1934 (though he credited the idea to Jacques Herbrand), Stephen Cole Kleene and Alan Turing in 1936, Emil Post in 1944 (though his work was completed long before its publication), and A.A. Markov in 1951. These apparently quite...